4 ms·

you can think of b2b as "every customer has access to different products at a different price" and optionally "they want to integrate their ERP with the ecommer

you can think of b2b as "every customer has access to different products at a different price" and optionally "they want to integrate their ERP with the ecommerce vendor's ERP". Also that the concept of customer is not what you might think it is.

amluto 3y ago
I’ll ignore the ethics and wisdom of a major retailer showing different customers different pricing, especially a retailer that operates physical stores with price tags on the shelves. Instead I’ll point out that, if you run a successful business (physical retail) and you want to add a secondary business (online sales of the same goods plus some other stuff), then getting the simplest model working well should be a much higher priority than adding fancy complications (bespoke pricing, for example).
- singingfish 3y ago
  yeah b2b is pretty much at the wholesale end, where everyone has different accounts with their own pricing negotiated as part of the contract and so on. If you go into an electrical wholesaler for example, you can buy at consumer prices, but the tradies will definitely be getting some kind of negotiated price depending on the scale they're operating at. From my experience in this space b2c is kind of a subset of b2b where you can treat the c as a single customer (see - users and customers are related but not the same) in the rest of the b2b mess. But totally for the simple case - a retailer who sells a particular kind of thing - the basic solution is pretty trivial. Search is tricky once you start moving from single product category into general catalogue. Then you're going to want things like rules to feed back search results from customer behaviour (one example of a few curly ones). Algolia seems to have solved that kind of problem adequately for now given the assumption of a certain level of quality of data in the licence holder's back end systems and aggregation code. Then there's things like variants (e.g. same product different colour / size) where it's tempting to make a naive implementation that won't scale and will be a maintenance nightmare, or where your data modeling fits the arbitrary case instead ...
  - singingfish 3y ago
    oh yeah, yet another thing to consider is there are plenty of garbage vendors in the ecommerce space
  - singingfish 3y ago
    another one to consider is that product classification should be thought of as arbitrary efficient representations of a hierarchy subject to structural change at any time. And that different customers can see different hierarchies. They're all simple problems once you start thinking about them int he right way, but getting them into a coherent architecture with minimimum spaghetfication is challenging. I'm definitely interested to hear about good agencies working in this space (not because I'm hiring).

amluto 3y ago

I’ll ignore the ethics and wisdom of a major retailer showing different customers different pricing, especially a retailer that operates physical stores with price tags on the shelves. Instead I’ll point out that, if you run a successful business (physical retail) and you want to add a secondary business (online sales of the same goods plus some other stuff), then getting the simplest model working well should be a much higher priority than adding fancy complications (bespoke pricing, for example).

singingfish 3y ago
yeah b2b is pretty much at the wholesale end, where everyone has different accounts with their own pricing negotiated as part of the contract and so on. If you go into an electrical wholesaler for example, you can buy at consumer prices, but the tradies will definitely be getting some kind of negotiated price depending on the scale they're operating at. From my experience in this space b2c is kind of a subset of b2b where you can treat the c as a single customer (see - users and customers are related but not the same) in the rest of the b2b mess. But totally for the simple case - a retailer who sells a particular kind of thing - the basic solution is pretty trivial. Search is tricky once you start moving from single product category into general catalogue. Then you're going to want things like rules to feed back search results from customer behaviour (one example of a few curly ones). Algolia seems to have solved that kind of problem adequately for now given the assumption of a certain level of quality of data in the licence holder's back end systems and aggregation code. Then there's things like variants (e.g. same product different colour / size) where it's tempting to make a naive implementation that won't scale and will be a maintenance nightmare, or where your data modeling fits the arbitrary case instead ...
- singingfish 3y ago
  oh yeah, yet another thing to consider is there are plenty of garbage vendors in the ecommerce space
- singingfish 3y ago
  another one to consider is that product classification should be thought of as arbitrary efficient representations of a hierarchy subject to structural change at any time. And that different customers can see different hierarchies. They're all simple problems once you start thinking about them int he right way, but getting them into a coherent architecture with minimimum spaghetfication is challenging. I'm definitely interested to hear about good agencies working in this space (not because I'm hiring).